Remarks by 1951 alumnus
David Oatman, delivered to his classmates
on the occasion of their 50th reunion, at the Colorado College
Fifty Year Club
Induction Service held in Shove Chapel October 12, 2001.
______________________________________________________________________
On behalf of the Reunion Planning Committee I am pleased to welcome
you here to this our Fiftieth Class Reunion. I am sure that all
the class members join me in expressing appreciation to the faculty,
friends, and spouses who are here to honor us today. President
Mohrman, we appreciate your remarks. Thanks to Jim Peterson who
headed up the very successful class gift project. Kudos are due
the Alumni Relations staff. Only after working with them for the
past nine months have I realized how complicated and detailed
a proposition it is to successfully pull off a Homecoming/multiple
class reunion event such as this. What a feat of coordination
! Special thanks to Dave Haraway, Dave, you were there every step
of the way in spite of the shuffling of staff and your extensive
schedule. You were the glue on this one.
Early on in these remarks, I want to acknowledge and celebrate
the 50th anniversary of the Freedom and Authority class. As an
Honors class it was and is a wonderful addition to the C.C. curriculum.
I have to tell you that there must have been a slip up at the
registrar’s office that founding year. Some how my name
was left off of those eligible to attend. However, in spit of
that over sight the forum was organized, prospered and remains
an institution to this day, a legacy of the Class of ’51.
Traditionally, we should at this point be reviewing the quote
“Good Old Days”, evoking memories of events, traditions,
teachers, places and happy times during our undergraduate years.
Modern day philosopher, Martha Stewart said, “ Remembering
is a good thing.” Foremost philosopher of our childhood,
Mae West, said “ Too much of a good thing is ………
Marvelous.” However my famously poor memory is a futile
source for that sort of adventure so I will not now pursue those
thoughts. On the other hand, I would invite any of you interested
to repair after the ceremony to the current equivalent of Oddonni’s
or North Gate where you can remind me of the details of why I
do remember that we had a very, very good time.
But memories, be they sharp or dim, still lead us to the fact
that the world is changing exponentially. With all that is going
on we forget:
That…avoiding the draft did not mean moving away from the
window
That…a cell phone call was the one call allowed from jail
That…our choice of beer was Coors –in a bottle or
a keg
That…drugs were Aspirin
That…major terrorism can happen here.
And now none of us can forget that our lives can change in a split
second.
On a more positive note, think of the changes that have come to
C.C. more gradually thru the last fifty years. Here again the
list is long and already well documented but I will give you one
illustration of how C.C. has raised it’s scholastic sights
since we came through the admissions process. A while back, quite
a while back, during an official alumni gathering in Chicago another
member of the ’51 football team, Bob Jones, and I were schmoozing
with the then President of the College regarding the switch to
the block plan and C.C.’s search for academic excellence.
The Prez says to us with a straight face and I quote, “The
school has really changed academically. You two fellas probably
couldn’t get in there now.” We gave him an A+ for
accuracy but flunked him on alumni relations. Afterward we both
laughed and it remains one of my favorite stories.
My wife of 48 years is Janet Adams, a Phi Beta Kappa in the Class
of ’53 whom, incidentally, I am indebted to for her liberal
editing of these remarks. Over the years we have had a running
conversation regarding the comparative ability of those with varying
scholastic gifts to successfully participate in and contribute
to this increasingly complicated world of ours. This usually good
- natured dialog has made us realize how many influences are at
play in this life and that academic achievement is but one of
the marks of an educated person. An eternal verity says that a
student’s job is not to learn fact and figures, but to learn
how to find them. How prophetic that has become. Today with the
Internet and search engines like Yahoo and Google, we can have
facts literally at our fingertips. What we did learn, --values,
responsibility, appreciation for the larger world of music and
the arts, how to relate to people from different backgrounds,
a sense of self,-- are not found in any specific curriculum. I
seize this opportunity, President Mohrman, to encourage your admissions
department to continue to accept not just the brightest but also
some of the best-rounded individuals when next year they choose
the candidates destined to sit in this gathering in the year 2056.
So here we are. How did a small liberal arts school like C.C.
get us to this place? I’m sure that there were many among
us, those self- starters, who knew where they were going, who
would have made it successfully anywhere. But C.C. with it’s
combination of nurturing faculty and intimate campus took the
many of us who were late bloomers and gave us the intellectual
and sometimes emotional tools to cope. We all have our own views
of success, accumulated wealth, personal power, how we treat our
kids, (or better yet how they treat us,) what we do for our neighbors,
a good golf score. No matter our standard, I think we could agree
that the time spent on this campus was fundamental to how we view
and deal with our place in life’s big picture.
Brother Shakespeare said:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.
It was here at C. C. that we received the foundation for the parts
we have played over the past 50 years. We come here today and
honor this Alma Mater, which has nourished us. Even though I was
assured years ago that the new C.C. would have passed me by, I’m
glad I was here.
